Thursday, March 8, 2012

Article: Into the Woods: A Whimsical Journey on the Brothers Grimm's Fairy-Tale Road

"Once upon a time, the Fairy-Tale Road north of Frankfurt was known as a kitch- and schnitzel-strewn diversion. On the bicentennial of the Brothers Grimm's first volume of stories, Raphael Kadushin follows the breadcrumbs and discovers one of Germany's most underrated pastoral dreamscapes (plus what might have really happened to those lost children of Hameln). "

"The fact that the sucker punch of the Grimm's stories could survive even Disney's neutered translation suggests the way the tales can still throw down their own kind of curse. Sure, there is usually a happy ending. But before the wedding coems a cavalcate of our fears, marching out like the seven pitiless dwarfs: abandonment, infantacide, boiling caldrons, chopped limbs, witches warmped and creaking like old wood. And those missing children, where did they go?"